Slavery's Medicine
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A01=Claire E. Gherini
amelioration movement
Author_Claire E. Gherini
Black healers
Category=NHD
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
colonial Jamaica
eighteenth century
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
herbalists
labor exploitation
medical racism
medicine and capitalism
pharmaceuticals
plantation hospitals
plantation overseers
slavery's legacies
slavery’s legacies
traditional remedies
urban hospitals
Product details
- ISBN 9780813952758
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 22 Aug 2025
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Healthcare and hierarchy in Caribbean plantation slavery
From their inception, British Caribbean sugar plantations generated wealth on the basis of nightmarish systems of labor exploitation, where illness was a constant of enslaved life. Then, in the second half of the eighteenth century, plantation owners tried to “improve” plantation slavery, targeting medicine and healing. But rather than improve rates of illness, they sought instead to make the work of medicine and care more economically predictable and efficient and to hurry the sick back to work. Healthcare became an arena for contests for power, as people struggled with one another over the terms of their work and how they recovered from illness. Slavery's Medicine uses a rich and substantial archival base to document the experiences of the sick, managers, doctors, absentee plantation owners, enslaved healers, and medical advice authors in this new, modern system of body management. Modern medicine ultimately sustained hierarchies among enslaved people and middling whites. Yet modern medicine also encouraged acts of resistance. It was, therefore, the creation of proprietors as well as enslaved men and women themselves.
From their inception, British Caribbean sugar plantations generated wealth on the basis of nightmarish systems of labor exploitation, where illness was a constant of enslaved life. Then, in the second half of the eighteenth century, plantation owners tried to “improve” plantation slavery, targeting medicine and healing. But rather than improve rates of illness, they sought instead to make the work of medicine and care more economically predictable and efficient and to hurry the sick back to work. Healthcare became an arena for contests for power, as people struggled with one another over the terms of their work and how they recovered from illness. Slavery's Medicine uses a rich and substantial archival base to document the experiences of the sick, managers, doctors, absentee plantation owners, enslaved healers, and medical advice authors in this new, modern system of body management. Modern medicine ultimately sustained hierarchies among enslaved people and middling whites. Yet modern medicine also encouraged acts of resistance. It was, therefore, the creation of proprietors as well as enslaved men and women themselves.
Claire E. Gherini is Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University.
